I think we in America have a screwed up idea of what it means to be a citizen. We seem to think that it means we go about our daily lives, stay out of trouble and let everyone else deal with the day to day workings of government and social ills. Oh, and complain about how much tax we have to pay and how the services we get nowadays are so horrible.

A citizen is more than just someone who lives in a particular area. It’s someone who takes an active role in his/her community. Someone whose world extends past their own family and concerns to those of the community in which they reside, whether they define that community as their neighborhood or their state or the the world at large. It’s someone who has compassion for and hopefully can empathize with those in need, whether because they’re homeless or lost a child to murder or an addict or just having a bad day. And finally, a citizen is someone who seeks to do something to eliminate injustice and poverty and fix the social ails of their community, however they define community.

A citizen does not leave a man dead in the streets for four hours. A citizen is not someone who walks past a dying man on a sidewalk, stops long enough to take a picture of him but does not bother to call the police. That is an animal, bereft of compassion for its fellow human beings. An animal who smells the blood of the weak and dying and wonders how it will benefit him/her. But those animals still need compassion and need to be taught how to be a citizen, otherwise the human race is going to end up destroying itself.

What’s the price of trying to have your cake and eat it to? Well, so far, for the Boy Scouts of America, that little piece of cake is gonna run about $19.9 million so far. Not including attorney’s fees.

The BSA wants parents to trust them to pick leaders who are good for the boys yet at the same time, it doesn’t want to warn the parents when it makes a mistake and finds out one of those leaders is a pedophile. So its hypocrisy is going to cost them big time. And I am glad of that. Maybe it will send a message to the leadership of the BSA that their attempts at being a “morally straight” organization are failing miserably and they need to change the way they do things.

I hope other young men who were abused by BSA leaders come forward and sue as well.

the Tea Party was mostly made up of blacks?

Read this wonderfully written piece by Tim Wise.

I have to say that after reading the article about the Evangelical Christian who just happens to be a filmmaker who just happens to find Noah’s ark, with what appears to be fresh straw inside it no less!, makes me want to cast my vote for hoax.

I’m sure there are many out there who think that finding Noah’s ark will prove that the Bible is real. But it won’t. It will only prove (maybe) that one of the stories told in the Bible is true. It says absolutely nothing about the truth of the beliefs that are held by those who view the Bible as a sacred text. That is a matter of faith and faith is, by definition, beyond proof.

If we have verifiable proof for our faith, it ceases to be faith. It is then fact. People may, at one point in time, had faith that if they dropped something it would fall down. Then Newton figured out how to calculate gravity and it worked every time and so now gravity is a fact and no one has faith in it anymore. Now there really is not much choice as to whether to acknowledge gravity or not. It is real. You can say it’s not, but there is objective proof that you are wrong. So you just end up looking like a fool.

The Divine does not want us to believe because we have have no choice. Or to avoid looking like a fool. The Divine wants us to believe because we choose to. Because we want to. And to have “proof” that God/dess exists would mean that our free will choice to believe or not believe is gone. So I don’t think there will ever be objective proof for the existence of God/dess.

That’s one thing that never made any sense to me about the theory of the Rapture. If it occurs as predicted, then anyone “left behind” can’t claim to have found faith in God or Jesus! They now have proof that Christianity is true and there’s no way they can now have “faith” that they can be saved….

OK, I just read the NY Times article about Laura Bush’s new book. In the book she apparently discusses at length for the first time the car accident in which she ran a stop sign, T-boned another car and killed the 17 year old driver of that car. The Times article says:

On a November night in 1963, Mrs. Bush and a girlfriend were hurrying to a drive-in theater when Mrs. Bush, at the wheel of her father’s Chevy Impala, ran a stop sign on a small road and smashed into a car being driven by Mike Douglas, a star athlete and popular student at her school.

[...]

Mrs. Bush concedes that she and her friend were chatting when she ran the stop sign. But she also suggests a host of factors beyond her control played a role — the pitch-black road, an unusually dangerous intersection, the small size of the stop sign, and the car the victim was driving.

Let me get this straight. SHE ran a stop sign while “chatting” with her friend and somehow, the kind of car the other kid was driving is a factor that played a role in the accident itself? I’ll grant you that the kind of car he was driving may have played a role in whether he might have survived the accident, but that’s the case in any car accident.

The plain and simple truth is that there is one cause and one cause alone for the accident and it was someting totally within her control: Laura Bush ran a stop sign. She alone is responsible for the accident. NOT the dangerous intersection, not the color of the road, not the kind of car the other kid was driving.

The ONLY reason that accident happened was that Laura Bush failed to stop at the stop sign. Had she stopped, there would have been no accident. The intersection would have still been the same. The car he was driving would have still been the same. The color of the road would have still been the same. The only difference is that the kid would still be alive.

Is it me or does victim blaming seem to come natural to wealthy, white Republicans?

A Louisiana Senate Judiciary Committee rejected a bill that would have allowed both parents in a gay adoption to have their name on a birth certificate. As it stands now, one individual from a gay couple can adopt, but the other cannot. Same with unmarried heterosexual couples (ie, only one can have their name on the birth certificate as long as they remain unmarried), so there’s no “discrimination” per se, but clearly the measure is aimed at preventing gay couples from both adopting children in the state.

The opposition to allowing these adoptions are, as usual, religious organizations.  One opponent, Rev. Louis Husser said, “This bill is nothing more than social experimentation using our children as guinea pigs.”

No, it’s not. There are already sufficient studies that show that children of gay parents are no different than children of heterosexual parents except that, in general, they tend to be more tolerant of diversity. Being raised by gay parents does not increase a child’s risk of being abused, of becoming a criminal, of becoming a drug user/alcoholic, or any of the other horror stories  and fear-mongering told by the radical religious right to keep gays from getting equal rights.

The only thing this narrow-minded, short-sighted and discriminatory law does is to ensure that children adopted by gays or unmarried couples do not have the full protection of the law that those married by straight married couples have.  That’s it! Plain and simple. Under this law, a child of a gay couple killed in an automobile accident stands to automatically inherit only the estate of one of his parents, not both. As it stands now, if a child of a gay couple gets ill while the “adoptive parent” is out of the country or out of communication, the child can’t be treated because the other parent has no legal say in obtaining medical treatment. If a life-threatening condition exists, then the hospital can use implied consent, but if it is something like cancer, treatment would have to be delayed until the “adoptive parent” can be reached and consent to treatment.

How is this helpful to the children of gay parents? How is this “justice” for those kids? And how can the lawmakers of Louisiana who support the current discriminatory law sleep at night?

NOTE: Someone changed the title of this post to “Opposition to Gay Adoption is Wrong”. I changed it back because I do not believe that it is my place to tell someone what they should or should not believe about gay adoption. What IS wrong is putting those personal beliefs, which are protected by the first amendment, into law, thereby violating the first amendment rights of everyone else to believe what they want about gay adoption. I think the distinction is critical because if I were to try to tell someone else that what they believe about any topic is wrong, then I become a hypocrite.

As an ordained minister, I’d like to personally welcome the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America to the GLBT community! Recently, the ELCA voted to get rid of all discriminatory policies concerning the GLBT community effective immediately! It’s nice to have you in our community! You’ll find we’re a very diverse group of people who really want only the same things all those heterosexual folks out there want: to be able to live our lives as we see fit according to the beliefs that we hold dear.

Unfortunately, you’re gonna start to feel the backlash now from other so-called “Christian” groups who think that your actions are in violation of God’s law. I hear that you’ve already lost member churches in California, Arizona, Iowa, Virginia, Minnesota, South Dakota and Ohio. But that’s okay. The message of Jesus was one of Love and you have learned that. They’ll learn it too one day….

But we sure are glad to have you with us.

Just when you think you can’t get enough of all those right wing pundits and mouthpieces for the radical religious right, a new on-demand network is supposed to debut later this year called “RightNetwork”. There are even celebrities plugging it, like Kelsey Grammer. OK, so there is one celebrity plugging it. Or at least one that most people on both sides will recognize.

The good news is that it is an “on-demand” network, so your kids can’t just stumble upon it unknowingly….

Some may ask why am I promoting it in this post? Because it is another indicator of the lengths to which the radical right will go to “win converts” and get their way.  And the radical right is in the pocket of the radical religious right, who want to turn this country into a “Christian nation”. And in order to do that, they have to dismantle the US Constitution and they have no problem with that.

I’m sorry. I really feel for the families in Vermont who fell to this prankster’s idea of a joke. But to call this an act of domestic terrorism (which it would have to be if the person committing it has been called a domestic terrorist) is just outrageous.

It makes great press and it inflames a lot of emotions to call it so, but it’s not. Even the Vermont AG says that the most they’ll be able to charge someone with  (if they can catch them) is a misdemeanor for threatening or harrassment. Making such hoax calls in a time of war is a federal felony, but someone could argue that war has never been declared by Congress and they’d be right. The press and the government might call it the war in Afghanistan or Iraq, but it’s technically and legally a military action approved by Congress and this nation is NOT in a state of war.

Domestic terrorism is Timothy McVeigh blowing up the Murrah Federal Building or gunning down abortion providers or sending anthrax through the mail.  Gay bashing is an act of domestic terrorism. Some, myself included, might consider Sarah Palin’s inflammatory rhetoric bordering on domestic terrorism by essentially calling President Barack Obama a terrorist sympathizer.

But calling someone and telling them their loved on died in Iraq or Afghanistan (the military does NOT notify families by phone and military families should know that) is most assuredly not an act of domestic terrorism. It is, in my humble opinion, an insult to all those who have lost loved ones to acts of domestic terrorism to say it is. It is fearmongering and an attempt to illicit an knee-jerk emotional response that’s worthy of the Bush-Cheney regime.

Oh, wait! There is no right to privacy according to many on the far right because, despite the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution which says “[t]he enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”,  the right to privacy is not enumerated in the Constitution. It was created by “activist judges”.

Tell that to the students of the Lower Merion school district where a tracking program, secretly placed on the free laptops given to the students, snapped pictures of an unknown number of students while they were in their homes as well as captured screen shots at the same time. One student, Blake Robbins, was allegedly disciplined for “inappropriate behavior” captured on one of those pictures. The inappropriate behavior, according to the family, was Blake eating “Mike and Ikes”, which the school district believed was “pill popping.”

The lawsuit, which is trying to gain class action status, also contends that an IT administrator with the school district downloaded pictures of some students to her personal computer, pictures they contend show some of the students naked or partially undressed. The IT admin denies the allegations and took the Fifth when asked if she had downloaded any images to her personal hard drive.

The school districts own investigation reveals that more than 56,000 images were taken by the built-in webcams on the computers. The tracking program was turned on by IT staffers, ostensibly when a laptop was stolen so it could be tracked. But there are many instances of the program being turned on for unknown reasons or the IT staff forgetting to turn it off once the laptop had been recovered, resulting in an additional 13,000 pictures.

I wonder what Rick Santorum would think if his daughter were one of the kids captured on a webcam without his consent? He said many times that there is no constitutional right to privacy.